


From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back.

by CollyWobbleKiwi



Category: Wraeththu - Storm Constantine
Genre: A lot of Headcanoning, Cult Religions, Kidnapping, Multi, New Zealand, entirely OC centric
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-30
Updated: 2016-04-30
Packaged: 2018-06-05 10:44:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6701659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CollyWobbleKiwi/pseuds/CollyWobbleKiwi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The weather had been overcast and most thought Christmas would come with rain as it did every few years. But three days before the weather cleared and blue skies greeted us. The summer sun was insistent. The breezes died away.</p><p>And the eldest of my father’s unmarried children, my mother’s oldest child, and my only full blooded sibling became the eleventh male child to be taken from the compound.</p>
            </blockquote>





	From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back.

**Author's Note:**

> A OC meander through my complicated and long-winded headcanons.

Summer droned a welcome beat against the still air the day I celebrated for the 9th time, the coming of the Lord and Saviour into the world, heralded by a bright star and choirs of angels from on high. Par the course for New Zealand. I’d seen a card once with a snowy scene on it and a red breasted bird and ~Merry Christmas!~ in gold upon that and it remained as bizarre in my thoughts as the first time I’d seen it.

The Pastor had asked my family to bring to the common meal table, that most traditional of New Zealand desserts, a Pavlova, and so my father’s three wives had been nearly apoplectic hoping that the chickens would produce enough eggs to create the whipped delicacy from their whites.

Third wife Veracity-for-his-Glory had, in particular, been frantic. It was she who took care of our share of chickens and she brooded over those birds tenderly anyway but had been found at the coop at all hours since the ‘request’ had been made, knowing that the yoke of disappointing the Pastor would be a heavy one.

The weather had been overcast and most thought Christmas would come with rain as it did every few years. But three days before the weather cleared and blue skies greeted us. The summer sun was insistent. The breezes died away.

And the eldest of my father’s unmarried children, my mother’s oldest child, and my only full blooded sibling; Magnificent-is-the-Sight-of-his-Unknowable-Face became the eleventh male child to be taken from the compound.

We lost our anticipation as our household fell into despair. Christmas Day so very bitter, for the Pastor would only allow three days to search for the missing. Christmas marked the end of any searches, or any praying, for Magnificent save for pleas of intercession that his soul find peace and being permitted to kneel and beg for its entrance to the Gates of Heaven.

There was a pall to the entire compound. Though everything was as Christmas always had been since we’d arrived at the compound some five or so years ago; with everyone dragging out their tables and chairs to arrange them in the small space between the housing, and those same tables carefully adorned with clean bright tablecloths and rarely indulged upon delicacies, there wasn’t the usual jolly atmosphere. The allowable amount of laughter and noise was missing.

Pretty with strawberries and cream adorning it, it was a wonder that the Pavlova was not ruined by my mother’s tears for she had, in the safety of our home, had difficulty controlling her sorrow.

Actually it was a wonder that the entire meal wasn’t incredibly salty. Magnificent wasn’t the first to go missing. He was merely the latest, in fact, of a rash of disappearances over the course of the spring and summer as we had emerged from indoors to begin the planting and harvesting season despite spring storms.

One by one, though we could never pin point when they disappeared with such perfect timing that the paranoia of the last disappearance had faded, when enough time had passed that we could accept that there had been yet another runaway. And until Magnificent had disappeared that is what I and all my family had believed, for the Pastor stressed often how young men could be easily mislead and seduced away from righteousness and all eleven were boys, all in the older range of childhood but none yet married.

And Magnificent had really been pushing the limit to what was a child at 19, far, far beyond what a child usually was and still not offered the wedding shears and a bride despite how many girls had recently become second and third wives.

But with the certainty of other’s sins torn away abruptly, and this thought came uneasily to me at the age of 9, I realised that if Magnificent never would run away… why should we discredit every sobbing wife who had to be ushered away from the search meetings, exclaiming that her own son would never run away?

And if they would never run away, then they must have been taken.

And why?

Was it those gangs who had torn up the larger cities? The brothels who peddled boys stupid enough to leave the compound looking for fresh meat?

As I set the tables with other children of my age range, I looked around at us all, only knowing who was a boy and who was a girl I realised it was probably because they were the easiest to pick out from the pack. The children in the compound were a genderless bunch to look upon. We wore beige homespun smocks with white underpinnings, a uniform that smothered the shape of the form beneath as busts rounded, but quickly gave away when shoulders began to widen because of the placement of the seams. Our hair was kept long and uncut till the day we were married, trailing long, single, tight braids down our backs, and our heads were covered by white cloth caps of a sort come straight out of a Renoir painting.

Girls quickly left the group of children the moment they began to round, becoming wives and then mothers. But there had been plenty of older boys yet considered ready to bear the burdens of being a family man.

The back of my neck prickled when I laid down the last knife, so I rubbed it and looked around but no one was there. Still I shivered.

Perhaps it was No-Eyes.

No I was sure it was No-Eyes, a childhood monster of mine. No-Eyes had been a figure of fear since the age of five. I thought it was without a doubt that No-Eyes had the boys. He was the sort that waited…and watched with the great emptiness of himself. But now he had acted. But I didn’t speak of this, not a peep, because I’d learned the same year I had first seen No-Eyes that I would be very sternly told off for mentioning him. In a world that was increasingly revealing that demons were walking amongst us, they didn’t need me adding to the aura of fear and suspicion with something deemed an imaginary friend gone wrong.

The next oldest of my brothers, Peace-to-all-Men (or Pace if he liked you), had told a hair raising tale not even a day before Magnificent had disappeared. He’d told of feeling fingers brush against the nape of his neck when he’d been picking in the orchard, only to find no one near him. When he’d checked himself he’d found his route having diverged greatly from up and down the rows of trees to heading off towards the isolated corner where Magnificent’s cap had eventually been found.

It could have been No-Eyes, up in a tree, because No-Eyes liked to sit high.

Magnificent had, at the time, punched him in the arm and told him to man up because everyone was terrified of what was happening, but we couldn’t stay inside because we wouldn’t eat otherwise. Getting enough food in to feed the whole compound took everyone who wasn’t infirm or in a cradle.

Besides, Magnificent had grinned and laughed as we had sat around the kitchen table to peel withered last season apples, glad to be out of the afternoon sun, of all of us Pace was likely to be sent right back. Who’d want to keep Pace who snored like a chainsaw and farted like a combustion engine? Then the next afternoon Magnificent’d not come in with the rest of us to the kitchen to help prep dinner.

In the wake of this, Pace had lost the funny bones his entire skeleton had seemed made of. He’d gone very quiet, unnatural for him. He was one who was never without a joke or something to fill any silence with. Motormouth comes to mind. But now the spark plugs had been pulled from him.

I don’t want to say not that this ongoing series of tragedies hit my mother the hardest of all the bereaved parents. But she had only two children to claim; Magnificent and myself, when most had six or seven. There had been a long and arduous ten years between our births in which she had visited many doctors and found no answers. My father had, had no issue with any of his other wives. In fact he was quite infamous that he had managed to impregnate his first second-wife when she had been in her fifties and he in his twenties. So the trouble lay in my mother.

My mother, by stint of this, should have been lowest wife in my father’s household. However she had been his first bride and was undoubtedly his favourite and so she was First Wife; First Wife All-Shall-Hear-the-Resounding-Joy, and so sat there at the high table with the Pastor and my father, her face stiff as she tried not to cry and cry for lost Magnificent who had been in the orchard with the rest of us when we had all last seen him.

I, younger and feeling as though my entire world had been shredded by the loss of the brother I loved the most, did not have such self-restraint. However I was under the yoke of what was acceptable enough that I made no noise, eyes and nose dripping quietly with nary a sob in case it proved too much. My smock, for I was a long while away yet before marriage came and made me an adult, had a damp patch beneath my chin from where my tears had been falling since I had seen my mother file in behind Father, her face so very sharply blank.

 No matter how many half-hearted hisses, or pinches and prods I received from my siblings, largely the effort of my father’s Second Wife Amity-between-all-Nations, there was no cessation to my outward expressions of misery.

Eventually they gave up. They were grieving too. I also had leeway, as the youngest child of our Father’s favourite and foremost wife. I was usually given a little more liberty than they and this was begrudgingly accepted.

It was the most dour of Christmases, with stiff faces and halting words as everyone struggled not to show their grief in front of the Pastor and be rebuked for it. His opening sermon before we began was about sin, most especially the sin of the outside world and how it must be resisted by hard work and prayer. There was a pronounced feeling of tension in the air as well. Something waiting for the slightest of pressure to snap it. People passed dishes with the greatest of care, and set plates and cutlery down with extra softness so that there was no clinking.

The Pastor made pointed comments several times about the silence to us all, but as the only one not to have suffered neither a disappearance of someone from within his household nor someone close like a cousin or nephew, he seemed to abruptly realise he was walking an unfavourable line.  Still, he said enough to push some to near breaking and by the time he eventually trailed off and focused his attention on the great meal before us all, shoulders were tensing and hands were fisted on cutlery so tight the knuckles were bulging.

Christmas was the one day when we were permitted to revel. My smock had little blue threads at the hems, while inside each sleeve my mother had sewn a secret blue star for me to find a private joy in, and my underpinnings were my best, a little white embroidery at the very edges permitted by the Pastor making the cloth a little heavier and swing strangely around my feet.

I even had a blue ribbon, tied in a neat knot at the end of my braid, but creating a festive bow had been beyond my mother. Its two long ends hung forlornly down to my knees from the near waist length braid. Next to the braids of the other children who had fluffed up bows, sometimes of several coloured lengths of ribbon, or even a piece of fake holly attached in decoration it was quite a sad sight.

I hadn’t asked any of my siblings or the other wives. Everyone had been too frantic and really if it wasn’t one of my mother’s bows what was the point. She tied them with such skill, and with thread and a needle she could even set the ribbon into flower shapes that would come undone when the thread was cut with minimal damage to the ribbon itself. It was that or nothing. I was a fussy spoiled child with standards.

I played with my braid and I cried all through Christmas, chewing my portion of chicken without tasting it, poking at my pearl potatoes, and not even caring for the preserves I usually gobbled my way through though a few of my older siblings served me a taste of them. We weren’t the most festive table, amongst the general aura of depression.

It was the most silent Christmas I’d ever celebrated.

Pastor, thinking he’d learned from the soured mood his earlier comments had caused, misguidedly commended us all later, in forced jovial tones, on how well behaved the children were and my father looked like he was going to be sick as he thanked the Pastor and came back to us.

At the end of the eating we lined up, all us children in our smocks and long hair, looking at the adults, the men with trousers and plain shirts, their hair clipped a uniform length all over, the women with their long dresses and aprons, hair cut to just touch the bottom of their earlobes.

We were given three gifts each. Quietly my father slipped me a paper wrapped parcel extra and we dutifully thanked our elders and then walked back to our bedrooms while the adults gathered in the main hall.

We had two older siblings who were already adults and wed that stayed behind, and they waved to us as we left the hall. We knew, the motely group of us, whatever was said once we were gone would be relayed to us eventually for Walls and Shepherd were not so much older yet that the great all of mysterious adulthood had come down between us completely.

The-Walls-Tumbled, and, Hark-Shepherds-and-Listen had been born by Father’s first Second Wife Humble-are-we-before-Him, who had died after The-Walls-Tumbled had been born. They had been born before Magnificent, and had been, after Humble’s death, Mother’s surrogate children. Mother had raised them and loved them like her own and had wept happily at both their weddings as she watched the Pastor wield his shears and cut them free of their childhood. Walls had only the one wife, two children, and always seemed to be smiling. Shepherd had three children to her husband and got along well with his First Wife. You could hear her singing when she did the laundry from quite a distance across the compound.

It was sweet, and not even the Pastor could tell her not to sing when it seemed an angel had come to rest in her throat.

As we trudged up to our rooms I heard the first rich peal of her voice and it did lift something in me.

I put my presents out on Magnificent’s bed and looked at them. I had a new pen and note pad for my lessons and a little paring knife. But from the extra package emerged three more presents and I realised my father had given me Magnificent’s presents. Magnificent had received a shell and wood rosary, a fine silk handkerchief like the men wore in the pockets of their plain shirts on special occasions, and a pocket sized edition of the Old Testament with a white leather cover.

All of my brother’s presents indicated to me that he had probably already had a bride picked out for him by the Elders. It was past time, he probably should have been married a year or two earlier. Maybe it had been set up so he would have been married Christmas day. That was how weddings tended to happen. You were given an indication adulthood was nigh, but you usually found out you were being married on the day, and who your future spouse was at the same time. It was usually more than one as well, to make things more efficient, and either during morning or evening prayer, or days like Christmas where everyone would naturally be gathered so nothing special had to be prepared.

Who though? There were no girls even close to marriage age since Be-Strong, Live-Well, and Delivery-from-Above had all become second wives about three months ago. The oldest girl I could think of was Sorry-for-Sin who was 13 and a half. The pagan law said sixteen was the legal age of marriage unless parental permission was granted to marry at 15, and we kept within that law simply because the trouble was not worth it, and disobeying it would invite the filth ridden outside in.

Ah, but old What-He-Will-Is-Done had died recently and so his three wives were widows and would likely remarry. I hoped it was Stand-Fast-on-High who had been chosen to be my brother’s wife, even if he was no longer here to receive her. She was only twenty five… ish. What-He-Will-Is-Done’s other two wives were in their fifties and that was… well second wife Humble had been in her fifties to my father’s twenties but she’d been a second wife.

Pushing these thoughts away I looked back at the bed.

It was an amazing haul that other children would have been jealous of.

I stuffed all of it into my bedside drawer and I curled up on my bed, head hurting from my own damn fault of crying all through lunch. There I lay until a sharp knocking at the door from Third Wife Veracity reminded me I had homework from the school to finish. I dragged myself to my desk and finished some very soggy maths worksheets, enough to cover the entire week and show to the teacher whenever she asked for them. Then I numbered them discretely, so I didn’t give away I’d done all the week’s handouts already and be given more, by giving her the same ones twice in a row.

I probably didn’t need to go to such lengths because she would only glance over them the once. The teacher I had didn’t really seem to want to be there.

I could hear Magnificent tell me it was better to be safe than sorry even though he wasn’t there, and that brought about a new round of tears and a throbbing headache as my water reserves ran dry.

I emptied our water jug and went down the hallway to refill it from the bathroom, then I sat at my desk, swinging my legs until boredom managed to overpower grief and I pulled my English worksheets over and began to work through them.

Pace knocked on my door as I finished the second one and came in, looking at the now messy desk where my worksheets had spread out onto Magnificent’s side.

“Mother said I needed I come check to make sure you were doing your homework but…” he shrugged, “you clearly don’t need it.”

He slumped into Magnificent’s chair and looked me up and down. Like nearly all of Father’s children he had inherited Father’s very dark brown eyes, but he had inherited Amity’s soft blond curls which made her look like a fuzzy golden sheep. It meant his braid was never neat with curls escaping each weave of it all the way down, and was frizzy in the humidity. Thanks to summer his face and hands were a golden brown and he had a smattering of freckles growing darker by the day.

He was so… drained of himself. Pace wouldn’t have done anything his mother asked of him in a normal fashion usually. He might have taken it upon himself to crawl in the window. Or hide in a closet while the occupant of a room was out and surprise them that way.

Knocking and entering politely wasn’t in his character.

 “You look a lot like Magnificent,” Pace said suddenly, “you know? You both look like First Wife Joy so much ‘cept he got Father’s eyes and you got hers.” His hands fluttered in the air in front of him and I was beginning to become distressed just having him in the room. My stomach was twisting unhappily and my throat began to fizzle with the sour taste of bile.

“…yeah,” was all I was able to say and nod my head.

Pace swallowed. The noise was horrible.

“Hey,” his voice cracked, “hey, Glorious look up. Hey.”

I looked up which meant I revealed the fact my eyes were nearly brimming over.

I had cried far too much. I could hear the taunts of ‘cry baby’ and the admonitions my tears were a waste even though no one had said anything.

“I shouldn’t have said that. I don’t know why I said that. Shit… I mean… fuck, I mean, don’t tell mother I said that shit” he bounced in place and scrunched his hands into the cloth of his smock, “Glorious I’m sorry. I’m sorry. If you know… if I hadn’t felt those fingers you know maybe they wouldn’t have taken Magnificent- oh shit. Shit. I’m sorry! I’m sorry Glorious.”

My vision had swum away. I cried another time but my body had not had the time to recover so I managed only a few fat tears and then my dehydration headache came roaring back like an iron hammer.

Pace hugged me. It was awkward. I felt the wirey muscle under his smock. Like Magnificent he was growing into a lanky body. He’d take after Father who was all legs and arms, as Mother put it. He patted the back of my head and let me go quickly.

“Hey,” he swallowed, “I’m the oldest brother now… in the house. You can come to me you know. If you need help. I dunno if I can help you like Magnificent did but I can help. And you know Walls can help too. He said to tell you. If you find it overwhelming.”

I nodded, throat tight. It was true. Pace was sixteen. There was a whole three year gap between him and Magnificent but no one filled it. Unusual when wives tended to take turns having a child per year. But then our father did things at a slower pace, as it was often joked, and with my mother unable to bear child, Verity coming later into our lives, and Amity being only a mortal woman there was an average of two years between most of the children so maybe three was not so strange if I thought about it.

“Don’t think so hard,” Pace managed a laugh, though it didn’t sound like his laugh, and poked me between my eyes “and try to go to bed early.”

“I will,” I nodded.

 Pace nodded back and pretty much fled my room.

A few minutes after his visit my door was knocked upon again, and my next oldest brothers poked their heads in to eye me. Clarion-of-the-Choir cleared his throat first, and Virtuous-and-Undoubted rolled his eyes.

“Did Pace … stop by?” Clarion asked.

“Yeah,” I nodded.

“Yeah,” Clarion looked at Virtue, “thought so. He’s… messed up about Magnificent, Glorious.”

Who wasn’t?

I just looked at them.

Virtue sighed, dramatically, like any 14 year old would while Clarion, wiser despite being younger, just shrugged and patted my head as though the two year age difference between us gave him that permission.

“C’mon we got evening prayers. Sit with us so mother and First-Wife Joy don’t worry about you.”

So I went. There was no option of backing out or skipping a prayer session. Everyone attended, even if they had to be wheeled into the main hall. Evening prayers were long but did not drag on into the small hours like they sometimes could. The birth of Our Saviour was not one that the Pastor lingered over for more than was necessary. It was Our Lord’s death and his salvation of us all, and the promise of the Kingdom of Heaven, that was the ultimate lesson.

The bedroom I returned to was even emptier than I’d left it. I shivered, finding the little room which fit two thin beds and two desks to be cavernous. Usually Magnificent would light the little camp stove he’d been given for his fourteenth birthday, and warm a little saucepan of our water jug up to pour back in so that we could clean ourselves with warm water. This wasn’t just him indulging me, he benefitted from warm water too, and kept me sweet at him so I’d still have my warm washcloth.

The irony was that it was still so humid and awful, the sea breezes halted and the air heavy on the skin, that the cold water I washed myself with, because I did not know where he kept his lighter, was refreshing rather than horrid. After praying harder than I’d done since I’d wanted a Tonka Ambulance playset at Christmas, rocking in place on my knees till they were locked stiff when I got up, I put myself to bed. Instead of sleeping though, I wasted precious solar-lamplight awake, Without Magnificent’s breathing in the room, I found my mind would not dim and I could not settle. It had been this way for three nights, and I was beginning to feel a little woozy in the mornings because of it.

Mind clear as a summer’s sky I lay in bed and stared at my hands. My nails were longer than they usually were. Magnificent’s last chore before bed was to go around with a little pair of nail-clippers and a bottle of foul tasting stuff, and inspect everyone’s hands. He would trim their nails neat and apply the bottle to anyone who had been chewing their nails (for behaviour like that was slovenly and belonged to animals.)

Perhaps something had been wrong in my older brother’s life before he disappeared. He had been lax in his duties for over a week before he’d been taken. My nails were not long but they were longer than I could recall them being. Magnificent kept them as little neat slivers of crescent moon white above the pink and had chastised me early in life into giving up chewing on them. The foul mixture had helped.

My braid lay against my neck and ran down my chest. I’d rebraided it after wiping myself clean, It was bulgy and bulky and a little frayed already. Little wonder, I so rarely did it for myself when Magnificent was the one who would braid it for me, had always without question braided it once it was long enough when we went to bed and when we got up, giving me a nice neat and tight braid that never fell apart.

The only time I had to do it was when he was ill. Or had to get up early to help Father.

I realised then, to my dismay, just how much I relied on him despite my growing age. I realised how much he had coddled me, and succoured me, when a normal child would have found me annoying or pushed me away, because as I began to cry for loss of him I immediately turned towards his bed to seek him out for comfort.

But he wasn’t there. No long form with its own dark braid of hair falling off the mattress. No kind words for me if I crawled up onto that bed, no understanding of my unhappiness, and no excuses made for me if my upset kept me up late and I needed extra sleep.

Magnificent was really the true example of a virtuous golden child. With few exceptions he was kind and loving, and the gold of his goodness had just seeped out of him, to my adoring eyes, though he had in fact come in shades of sable brown. The saying came to mind that there was nothing he could do wrong in our parent’s eyes, and he truly did nothing wrong and was all the more golden for it.

I cannot think of a single one of our siblings who had grief with him beyond minor childhood incidents. Often those were because he’d caught them being naughty than he’d done something to them.

Something rapped at the window. I jumped to my feet out of the bed and swung open our small window, suddenly ablaze with hope and happiness because in my mind who else could it be but Magnificent? Back. Likely climbed up the rickety fire-escape outside to sneak back in out of embarrassment.

He’d crawl in through the window and fall asleep on the bed and in the morning everything would be better!

But I opened the window and there was nothing outside but blackness. Everyone had turned off their lights. Our generators were ancient things and fueling them was increasingly a problem. Solar lanterns were too dim to make the distance between houses. A few grey smudges out in the dark might have been windows where other’s had lights on but in all likeliness it was only I standing there with a lantern on. Only I.

Sleeping and waking were regimented. No one wanted to waste precious time they could rest.

The darkness outside loomed in and I remembered No-Eyes and how No-Eyes was always waiting in the darkness and quickly slammed the window shut despite the noise that made, racing back to hide beneath my summer blanket.

I waited with my heart racing. Sweat immediately began to gather on my face from just being under my blanket. It was so nauseatingly hot. No hand pushed the window open from the outside. No tapping occurred again.

My stomach growled.

I sighed and got up, crawling on the floor so that I couldn’t be seen from the window in case No-Eyes really was out there. Eating after dinner was strictly prohibited but I thought maybe I could be forgiven a piece of fruit from the fruit basket. It was summer and our portion of stone fruit fairly over flowed. An apricot wouldn’t be missed. A nectarine could disappear without comment.

I tip toed or rather shuffled, not lifting my feet so I didn’t change the pressure on the floorboards, to the stairs, and managed to carefully get down them, balancing precariously on the very edge of each one to remain soundless.

But the kitchen was occupied, though still dark, lit only by a small candle burning near the end of its life on the table. My mother was sitting quietly in the rocking chair that Grandmother had in the nook near the stove so she could watch the weather and heat herself too. When she saw me she smiled, clasping a mug in her hands that was steaming slightly.

Mother looked older than I’d ever seen her. I’d not noticed the lines around her mouth and eyes before nor the crease between her eyebrow but now did they appear, as though drawn on with black ink. Her eyes, faded blue, were distant, and her dark thick hair had silver sprouting through it by her ears.

“You didn’t eat much at the Lunch,” she commented, “I don’t think it will matter if you eat a peach Glorious.”

I nodded, a little worried I was going to be in trouble anyway, but all she did was sigh. When I made my way across the kitchen and had a fuzzy skinned fruit in my hands, she said “come sit with me while you eat that” and so I pulled over a kitchen chair, wincing at every squeak and scraping noise it made, and sat in front of her.

Mother sipped her tea, and nodded to a pretty jar with a dainty gold ribbon fluffed up on the lid of it that was sitting on a unlit part of the stove next to a still steaming kettle.

“The Pastor’s Second-Wife came and dropped off some tea to sooth sore throats and give a pleasant rest,” Mother murmured, touching the little ribbon sellotaped to the top of the jar and smiling. There was a proper sticky patch underneath it that had all its corners curled up and matted with dirt from being repeatedly reused but the bright yellow ribbon was well preserved. It looked quite pretty, I thought maybe the jar had maybe come from that one time there had been mistakenly ordered Mediterranean preserves instead of preserving jars from the Meditz Wholesalers, strange rich tasting capsicum and tomato combinations that had come in quite handsome vessels. It wasn’t the sort of jar one gave away lightly. “I believe his household feels a little guilty for not being so stricken, and for how he …” her voice trailed off. My heart was in my throat. You did not question the Pastor. He did the Lord’s work and spoke with the authority of our lord and saviour. He was the shepherd who lead us to salvation.

“How he behaved, his piggish behaviour at Christmas” she said in a rush. For a moment I felt queasy from the shock and also the delight at her behaviour.

She pressed her fingers over my grinning mouth. I closed it, knowing I must never ever repeat what she had said.

“Anyway,” she reached out to me and I left the chair to go into her arms. She folded me against her and I pressed my face into her shoulder. This was my warm and safe place. I was too old and heavy to be lifted by her. But her shoulder still had room for my head. She rubbed my back and I felt the stinging weight of tears build….then fade away. My reserves were utterly exhausted. Even my headache was half-hearted in its pulsing.

“Do you want a cup?” she asked, voice vibrating in my hair, breath a warm puff on my scalp, and I nodded.

She put the teastick she’d used into a new mug and relit the stove. The water heated back up quickly, perhaps she’d meant to have two cups of tea to herself. She poured the water and we waited for it to brew, longer because we were reusing the leaves.

Was my mother expecting a lot of sore throats and uneasy sleeps? Maybe it was habitual frugality.

The tea brewed a dark clear amber and she tapped out the teastick into our bin meant for compost.

“We’d better be for bed,” she announced reluctantly once she sat back down, but neither of us moved from the dark kitchen, sipping at our mugs, she easily and me gingerly because of the heat. I found I didn’t like the tea. I was usually allowed a small watery gumboot tea with milk in it and that I did like, but fragrant blends like earl grey made my nose curl and I quite disliked the underlying bitterness they always had. Sadly the good Second-Wife of the Pastor’s efforts had produced something of a similar ilk, a little too perfumey for me to tolerate with a lot of rose and lavender, but it was a gift and my mother had made it, so I occupied myself with my lips on the rim but not really doing much. I could appreciate how the steam felt against my sore cheeks and eyes at least.

That was how I came to be nodding off, nearly planting my nose into my still fairly full mug.

My mother gently shook my shoulder and we shuffled upstairs, exchanging smiles as we avoided the same floor boards together. She tucked me in as though I hadn’t started school yet. I didn’t protest. I wanted as much of her attention as possible because it made me feel a little less wretched. I was lucky to have a mother who could spend such time on me; lucky to not have to share her with four or five other siblings. I had always been told that but now I felt it profoundly in her arms. A placebo for the attention Magnificent had given me? A need for comfort from my other closest relative? Likely both.

 


End file.
